Once Upon A Time eBook

It was the moment for which each had so often longed,
with which both had so often tortured themselves by
living in imagination, that now, that it was theirs,
they were fearful it might not be true.

Finally, he said: “And the charm never
failed! Indeed, it was wonderful! It stood
by me so obviously. For instance, the night before
San Juan, in the mill at El Poso, I slept on the same
poncho with another correspondent. I woke up
with a raging appetite for bacon and coffee, and he
woke up out of his mind, and with a temperature of
one hundred and four. And again, I was standing
by Capron’s gun at El Caney, when a shell took
the three men who served it, and only scared me.
And there was another time—­” He stopped.
“Anyway,” he laughed, “here I am.”

“But there was one night, one awful night,”
began the girl. She trembled, and he made this
an added excuse for drawing her closer to him.
“When I felt you were in great peril, that you
would surely die. And all through the night I
knelt by the window and looked toward Cuba and prayed,
and prayed to God to let you live.”

Chesterton bent his head and kissed the tips of her
fingers. After a moment he said: “Would
you know what night it was? It might be curious
if I had been—­”

“Would I know!” cried the girl. “It
was eight days ago. The night of the twelfth.
An awful night!”

“The twelfth!” exclaimed Chesterton, and
laughed and then begged her pardon humbly. “I
laughed because the twelfth,” he exclaimed, “was
the night peace was declared. The war was over.
I’m sorry, but that night I was riding
toward you, thinking only of you. I was never
for a moment in danger.”

THE AMATEUR

I

It was February off the Banks, and so thick was the
weather that, on the upper decks, one could have driven
a sleigh. Inside the smoking-room Austin Ford,
as securely sheltered from the blizzard as though he
had been sitting in front of a wood fire at his club,
ordered hot gin for himself and the ship’s doctor.
The ship’s doctor had gone below on another
“hurry call” from the widow. At the
first luncheon on board the widow had sat on the right
of Doctor Sparrow, with Austin Ford facing her.
But since then, except to the doctor, she had been
invisible. So, at frequent intervals, the ill
health of the widow had deprived Ford of the society
of the doctor. That it deprived him, also, of
the society of the widow did not concern him. Her
life had not been spent upon ocean liners; she could
not remember when state-rooms were named after the
States of the Union. She could not tell him of
shipwrecks and salvage, of smugglers and of the modern
pirates who found their victims in the smoking-room.